Learn how the E-N crime team does their jobs and read about the quirky characters they encounter and the sometimes bizarre things that can happen at a crime scene that don't make it into their stories.

Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil …

On some streets, silence often seems safer, more dependable, than law.

Take the Camelot neighborhood, close to Walzem and Gibbs-Sprawl Roads. A month ago, a 17-year-old boy was shot and killed around 4 p.m. on a Thursday, while in a fight between about six people.

Fabian Mosdy died en-route to Brooke Army Medical Center.

At least a dozen other people stood outside the apartments and children drove their bikes up and down the wide streets.

But when Bexar County Sheriff’s deputies and reporters arrived, it was as if they had been struck deaf, dumb and blind. Did they know Fabian? Yes. Were they outside? Maybe. Did they see what happened? No, definitely not.

Some witnesses told deputies Fabian might have been defending his girlfriend, who lives at the apartments, when he was shot by one of the three or four suspects.

But others said that didn’t make sense, it wasn’t even his girlfriend.

“My (friend) got shot and it wasn’t even the real deal. I know what happened,” one teenager said into a cell phone, as he sat close to the bloodstained concrete.

What happened, a reporter asked. You know Fabian? Were you his friend?

No, no and no.

One woman, who said she saw four men running and suspected who they were, dismissed questions by pointing across the street where she lives with her three children.

“I don’t want any trouble,” she said.

Deputies haven’t yet caught the suspects but say they know their names and are confident witnesses will identify them from a line-up as soon as this week. Still, they refer to an old police joke: a guy is stabbed in a crowded bar but when police arrive, everyone, even the bartender, was in the bathroom.

“It happens a lot,” said Sgt. Martin Molina, “depending on which area of town you’re in.”

The neighborhood where Fabian lived is rife with gang and drug-related activity and high in crime, he said.

“People tend to mind their own business a lot and not get involved,” he said. “They feel the police are not going to be there when someone goes back for retaliation.”

Of course, he said, “that makes it difficult. Even though we know who these people are, we have to go through other means.”

“You can feel deep in you heart that this person is the one,” said San Antonio police Sgt. Robert Farley. “But if you’ve got no witnesses or no evidence, it’s nothing.”

Wednesday, Farley encountered a similar headache to Molina’s. A 43-year-old man, driving around with two acquaintances, pulled into a driveway by the 800 block of East Carson Street. As one man got out the truck, the other hit the driver, with what police believe to be either a small ax or hammer. The man was bleeding and running up and down the street, one witness said, before the suspect fled in a car parked a block away.

But when police arrived, the third passenger hadn’t seen anything. He didn’t know either the suspect or the victim or why a fight ensued.

But Farley, who had encountered plenty a mute witness in his career, still detained the man for more questioning.

“You don’t even know his street name?” he asked dubiously. “Even when you guys were driving around together?”